The Boston Marathon Bombings in The New Yorker

A year ago today, two bombs exploded near the finish line of the Boston Marathon, killing three people and wounding hundreds more. What was once a scene of triumph, pride, and joy—the emotions of runners finishing a 26.2-mile journey, and of the people lining the course to support them—quickly turned to chaos.

“There’s something particularly devastating about an attack on a marathon. It’s an epic event in which men and women appear almost superhuman,” Nicholas Thompson wrote that day. “But it’s also so ordinary. It’s not held in a stadium or on a track. It’s held in the same streets everyone drives on and walks down. An attack on a marathon is, in some ways, more devastating than an attack on a stadium; you’re hitting something special but also something very quotidian.”

In the first issue after the attack, which featured a cover by Eric Drooker called “Shadow Over Boston,” George Packer wrote about the bravery of Bostonians on April 15, 2013. “The two brothers who apparently planted the bombs may have planned on big crowds and the attention of global media, but they didn’t figure on the solidarity that defines Boston on Marathon day,” he wrote:

In the minutes, hours, and days after the blast, everything seemed to work. People knelt on the pavement and used belts or scraps of clothing to tie off tourniquets and prevent the maimed from bleeding to death. A pediatric resident who had almost finished the race jumped over the barricades and evaded the police to tend to victims. Volunteers instantly transformed the medical tent behind the finish line into a triage station. A man who had lost his own son in the Iraq War rushed a young man whose lower legs had been blown off to the tent, and so kept another father from losing his son. Reporters and photographers covering the end of the race instantly turned into war correspondents and captured indelible stories and images. Ambulances made their way through the chaotic streets in minutes. Staff at Boston’s hospitals quickly and methodically prepared to receive mass casualties and began operating on the injured within half an hour of the blasts, preventing any more deaths after the first, tragic three. And on Thursday the F.B.I. and the local authorities, aided by a description provided by the young man who had lost his lower legs, were on the verge of breaking the case, when the killers decided to come out shooting.

Tamerlan Tsarnaev was killed in the battle that followed. (Seth Mnookin reported on a Greater Boston transformed by the police chase.) Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was captured the next day, but that, of course, was not the end of the story. The Internet, which catches and gathers so many of the traces we leave of ourselves online, gave us glimpses into their minds. “The sense of bland unknowingness—‘He seemed so nice!’—began to evaporate the closer we got to the Tsarnaev brothers,” David Remnick wrote:

Tamerlan’s YouTube channel features a series of videos in support of fundamentalism and violent jihad.… Dzhokhar’s Twitter feed—@J_tsar—is a bewildering combination of banality and disaffection. (He seems to have been tweeting even after the explosions at the finish line last Monday.) As you scan it, you encounter a young man’s thoughts: his jokes, his resentments, his prejudices, his faith, his desires.

The process of encountering Dzhokhar in particular was an unsettling one: “What we didn’t see, and what perhaps we longed to see in our grief, or anger, or confusion, were any familiar images of the Islamic terrorist,” Ian Crouch wrote in July, after Rolling Stone published its controversial cover of the younger Tsarnaev. “This may be the most inconvenient fact about Dzhokhar Tsarnaev: that he has survived to face trial, and so to keep facing the rest of us who live in Boston, and in the rest of the country.” Dzhokhar’s trial is scheduled for November. (In July, Amy Davidson wrote about his appearance in court, where he plead not guilty seven times.)

“To overcome this kind of trauma takes time, time during which we need to look ahead positively,” Haruki Murakami wrote for this Web site, in May. “Hiding the wounds, or searching for a dramatic cure, won’t lead to any real solution. Seeking revenge won’t bring relief, either. We need to remember the wounds, never turn our gaze away from the pain, and—honestly, conscientiously, quietly—accumulate our own histories. It may take time, but time is our ally.”